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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

For our personal behavior, let's remember than reducing consumption reduces pollution more than reusing, which reduces pollution more than recycling. By the time you're relying on recycling, you've already polluted a lot more than you needed to, all the more so at the poor efficiency the article reports.

If you don't create the plastic bottle you don't have to figure out how to undo its pollution.

We probably can't avoid all plastic use, but we're orders of magnitude above minimal use, considering plastic didn't exist for most of human history, and most current use doesn't improve anyone's quality of life.

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From the final paragraph of the article:

"If you could make a milk jug with 30 percent less material because it's mechanically better, think of the sustainability of that," he said. "You're using less plastic, less oil, you have less stuff to recycle, you have a lighter product that uses less fossil fuel to move it."

In effect this could help to reduce consumption as you suggest (and as I agree).

The milk jug is so light and thin already, any more improvement is lost in the noise. Consume (waste) less milk, you're doing an order of magnitude more good.

Millions of pounds of plastic are made every year for milk jugs. A 30% improvement would not be lost in the noise.

Lost in the noise of producing milk. There is an astronomical amount of environmental resources to get to the point of filling the jug. Just wasting less milk (buy only what you can use to avoid dumping what has gone bad) would blow 'lighter milk jug' out of the water by many orders of magnitude. And using 30% fewer jugs saves 30% right out of the gate.

Isn't this reasoning essentially comparing a drop-in replacement with an ideal, though? Assuming this is a new technology that can actually make it through to manufacturing changes, the possible 30% reduction in plastic by using hybrid PE/PP is controlled by the relatively few milk producers and should be much more tenable than the societal change required for 30% reduction in milk use. Both reduce plastics usage, but one is a relatively quick change and the other requires change from many independent agents over a long time, so I don't understand why one is being trivialized. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Sure, go ahead and do it. But it hardly matters. We could also arrange a system to collect fingernail clippings and compost them to make fertilizer for public gardens for the poor. Its just that everybody's time is better spent on things that have larger marginal impact.

I do agree with reducing consumption in general, but less plastic per bottle certainly helps in this regard. I think drinking less or no "milk" (or any other drink) by itself is not a practical solution on its own.

Plus you may found out you are part of a population getting healthier with less milk input, and it's always good to know. It can take a lot of time to notice, and no doctor is going to advice for it but the effects can be important. It's worth a try.

The 3 R's... Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The order of them is intentional.

The PSAs that I've seen have always been "recycle, reduce, reuse". Doing a Google search on both shows your order having about 435,000 hits and mine having 214,000.

It seems like an education problem; I don't think it's ever been pointed out to me that the more-common ordering was intended to also express the favorability of the options (although it makes sense, looking at it).

I am very skeptical about recycling (I do recycle though) - it seems like a tremendous about of CO2 is spent just moving the recycled goods from homes to the recycling facilities + the energy spent recycling the product + the energy used shipping the product to a plastics distributor. The option of filling our landfills is also costly but is it offset by recycling?

Does anyone know how recycled plastics stack up against new plastic once you consider the energy used in the entire recycling chain?

It's not only about CO2, burning plastics produces other harmful compounds, and without burning they stay for very long.

> I am very skeptical about recycling

I am too. I really despise that they push the burden onto the customer, instead of hiring people or robots to pick bottles or other shit out of the trash stream and recycle it. As a homeowner, I'm paying them for trash service. If there's a cleaner way (recycling - which isn't necessarily any greener, as you pointed out) , the waste management industry should be forced to do it for the greater good, just like coal plants are forced to run their exhaust through scrubbers to remove pollutants. They shouldn't profit, or burn millions more gallons of diesel driving huge recycling trucks around, by forcing (or guilting) us to do unpaid labor.

I wonder what the balance of increased e-commerce (packaging materials) to reduced shopping gas consumption is like for resource use.

Remember, if possible, reduction to zero use is best of all! Imagine how much better off the world would have been if we hadn't found cures for polio and small pox and minor bacterial infections - and reduced the incidence of many more - if we hadn't eliminated the earth's human-filtering effect of starvation through the green revolution. The world, she would be so much more sustainable then!

I'm gonna consume all your resources, bitch

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